Drum and bass, cars, bioinformatics, genomics, microbes and life in sunny Scotland

Monthly Archives: July 2007

It just occured to me to look at the summer weather predictions that had been bandied about before the rain, and this BBC article is a gem.

Quoteth the Met Office:

The Met Office’s official forecast for this summer, released on Wednesday, said there would be “periods of very hot weather”, warning that it could affect the “very young and very old” and those who suffered with breathing difficulties.

“The forecast for rainfall is less certain, and currently there are no indications of an increased risk of a particularly dry or particularly wet summer,” it continued.

So this could be my last post on this topic for a while. It looks like consumers have been royally stitched up by the banks and the OFT. Yesterday the news came out that the OFT and the major banking groups have agreed to a test case. This has had the effect that the FSA is now telling banks they don’t need to deal with complaints, the Ombudsman can also not deal with complaints and all current court action is likely to be stayed until the test case is heard.

None of the consumer groups involved in the bank charges revolt were informed about this despite the decision allegedly being made ‘in consultation’ with them. This test case might take anywhere from a year to two years to be heard.

I am not the only person who has been fobbed off on the phone for the last 6-8 weeks regarding settlement letters, and the banks have clearly been telling staff to put us off so this announcement could be made. However I now wonder whether the verbal offer I received on the phone counts, as current offers made still have to be resolved.

This does little to increase my faith in the banks, FSA or OFT quite frankly. It’s coincided nicely with the Parliamentry summer break, the banks get a year or more to mobilise their vast litigious assets, and the consumer will get shafted in courts.

I’m quite jealous of the people who managed to get their settlements in before this, my only consolation being that if I had started court proceedings when I said I would, it would now still be ‘stalled’ in court, and depending which way the test case goes, my complaint is lodged with my bank already, which if it goes in the consumers favour, would have meant that any court claim would have been wasted effort.

Still pretty sick about the whole thing, although unlike some people on the forums I haven’t actually been spending the money I thought I was going to get already (tut tut). My plans for getting a laptop this year though are now absolutely on hold!

Practically everyone I know is there and it’s a lot of fun catching up with people I knew from school, whilst keeping in touch with old friends and colleagues.

I was amused then to see this on CNNMoney.com then. Particularly this paragraph:

“Among the younger set, e-mail is increasingly passé. Instead, when they want to reach someone they “facebook” them. Groups can emerge for anything. One group of 227,000 at Facebook supports Barack Obama, and for some reason 143,000 – presumably mostly feckless college kids – have joined the group “I Secretly Want To Punch Slow Walking People In The Back Of The Head.””

I must confess that the latter group is one I am a very proud (and not so feckless!) member of ;)

So the July 13th deadline passed that Natwest said they would get a letter to me by and after giving them ample ‘postal strike’ time, I called them up again this morning.

The girl I spoke to sounded like she was half asleep, or stoned, or possibly both, but after asking me if I had ‘changed address’ recently said she would send me out another offer letter that would be here in 2 weeks. I’m counting the days down again, I think if it fails to arrive, then I will just have to take it to court, I was hoping to have this settled by now but it seems far from it still.

But basically think 3 days of interesting and eclectic music, private chalets to sleep in, lots of cool people to talk to and safe in the knowledge that 3 days of your life has been gently controlled by Portishead themselves.

So some of you may have noticed a brief hiatus there whilst the site was down. Basically technolabs.co.uk (which hosts all of our lovely domains) was getting towards the end of its life. Over the weekend the hardware was replaced, data was transferred, and surprisingly little has been lost in the process. I’ve fixed a couple of permissions issues and we’re good to go again. For those geeky people out there the new hardware is: